Yahoo! introduces performance bases pricing, in order to increase the quality of their advertising traffic network. Donny Simonton, Parked.com‘s CTO, sent an email on this topic:

Last night Yahoo, our primary search provider, announced to all of their advertisers and partners that they would be implementing a “quality based pricing” system starting immediately in the United States and Canada.

“…quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network. Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary factors.

To assist you in better understanding the level of your traffic quality, we plan to provide you with a Traffic Quality (TQ) score for each of your implementations. TQ scores should be included in your partner reports and communicated as a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

By pricing traffic commensurate with quality, we believe that we will deliver higher value to our advertisers, thus strengthening our marketplace and driving up monetization for our partners.”

This is how the “quality based pricing” system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let’s say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we should be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we should be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the new system. We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system. One last thing is that this will affect all parking companies that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager [...] if you have any questions.

In the end this should hopefully increase payouts for high-quality traffic domains. Also this might actually give domain investors an indicator as to which domains perform best for the advertisers and where the targeting needs to be improved.

Some Canadian news from the public Domain Company Communicate.com, holders and developers of such sites as perfume.com. Their current CEO, David Jeffs stepped down:
From their blog:

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — (MARKET WIRE) — June 01, 2007 — Communicate.com Inc. (OTCBB: CMNN), an emerging growth, debt-free eCommerce company, is pleased to announce the appointment of seasoned Internet industry executive C. Geoffrey Hampson as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

David Jeffs will continue as Communicate.com’s President and will remain a Director of the Company’s Board.

Communicate.com is also pleased to announce that Mr. Hampson has invested USD$1 million into the Company through a non-brokered private placement of 1 million units. Each unit consists of a common share of Communicate.com and a common share warrant exercisable at $1.25 per share. As per U.S. Securities regulations, the common shares are restricted and are subject to a minimum one-year holding period.

Mr. Hampson has been a Founder, President and CEO of many successful start-up and operating companies over the last 25 years. Mr. Hampson was CEO and President of PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc., an Internet infrastructure company. During his leadership, PEER 1 grew from a small local player with annual revenues of approximately USD$250,000 to one of the largest in the industry, with annual revenues of approximately USD$61,000,000 and data centers and network points of presence in 14 cities across North America and in Europe. Mr. Hampson was the founder and CEO of Novocon International Inc., a manufacturer of fiber products for composite reinforcement until Synthetic Industries acquired it in 1997.  

[via blog.cmnn.com]

And here’s the news of the day, possibly of the year. Oversee.net, the parent company of DomainSponsor has purchased Snapnames today for an undisclosed sum. Big news, even a bit bigger because of the eNom (owned by Demand Media) deal reported on earlier.What’s next? Will they go public next year, or even later this year?

According to Frank Schilling, the rumour on the street is that the price was $25 or $50 Million USD.

As predicted, consolidation is and remains a major topic for the year – let’s see what the rest of the year brings. And the effects of this sale are going to be interesting as well – especially since Oversee.net owns it’s own domain portfolio. So will this affect which names go to auction and which ones don’t? At this point we can just wait and see.

Congratulations to both companies.

[via email/Seven Mile/DomainTools Blog]

The DomainRoundTable conference hosted in Seattle from August 13th to August15, 2007 has just opened their conference registration at a ticket price of $1495 USD. If you provide some additional data during the registration process, you can save $50 dollars if you fill out a survey. Also the first 100 registrants will receive a eNom reseller account with a credit of $100 USD.

One feature (as a matter of fact not too many other details have been published so far) of the conference that looks very neat are the high tech nametags.

According to a reader of Frank Schilling’s blog, eNom and SnapNames have partnered in order to make expired names from eNom customers available in the SnapNames auctions. This validates SnapNames as the biggest de-facto marketplace for expiring domains and from a business perspective this partnership just makes sense. SnapNames reaches the biggest buyer audience out there and takes a lot of hassle out of managing the expiry of names.

Of course I would imagine that eNom will not provide all of the expiring names to SnapNames and continue to add some of the names to their own portfolio. It would not come as a surprise that after Melbourne IT, eNom there will be additional registrars to partner with SnapNames.

Also it’s important to note that it appears (at least at the moment) that eNom will keep on operating it’s ClubDrop website in order to grab expiring names with the help of their plentiful number of registrar accreditations hosted on their platform.

From a registrant perspective a registrar’s partnership with SnapNames can reduce the grace period the original registrant has to renew their name. While the maximum time frame for a renewal and/or redemption of a name can last up to 75 days, in some cases it can be as short as 10 days. Make sure you renew your names early and in time.

[via SevenMile]

It seems that the registry realized that they would lose out on a lot of money if they were to let today’s .info drop happen normally. Hence they decided to hold the drop. Now we just need to wait for the registry announcement about the premium .info auctions, .mobi style.

From an email from Pool.com:

As you may know, today’s .INFO drop was expected to be quite large with great domains becoming available for public registration. Please be informed that the .INFO registry, Afilias, has placed a hold on selected domains. Consequently, most of the more popular .INFO domains expected to delete today will not be released in today’s drop. Please note we will keep you updated on the status of these domains as we receive new information from Afilias.

[Update]: As it turns out some of the two word domains did drop today and I also I see some in the SnapNames auctions – for example WesternTravel.info.

[Via SevenMile]

From the Verisign Press Release:

VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), [...] today announced that its Board of Directors has elected William A. Roper, Jr. as President and Chief Executive Officer. He has served as the Board’s lead independent Director and replaces Stratton D. Sclavos, who resigned from the company. The Board also elected Edward A. Mueller as Chairman of the Board. 

So just like that Mr. Sclavos resigned from the board. There must be more to the story – but no additional information was made public. It’s a big change for a company that influences so many domain owners. Kinda makes you think that this company is even more “public” than just being traded on the stock market. ICANN, are you watching?

[via ValleyWag]

In a surprising email Google told their Adsense for Domains publishers that they are re-allowing Adult Domain Traffic into their network. In April they had announced that all publishers had to remove adult domain names from their portfolios by May 31st. It can only be assumed that this change of mind might be based on the fact that some of the biggest Adsense for Domains publishers have recently switched the adult traffic to other advertising networks. Maybe Google did not realize how big this chunk of business is?

After the Registerfly disaster, ICANN is now finally starting to look for someone to provide registrar data escrow services. But wait, just as they start thinking about this problem, the next problem appears on the Horizon: According to recent filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the company behind Tralliance, TheGlobe.com Inc., will run out of cash later this month.

[via DomainNews]

The CNBC story was indeed about Kevin Ham, but it mainly focussed on Agoga, the business that monetizes the “.cm” (Cameroon) ccTLD. So unfortunately the story portrayed in the show did not show the most positive faces of domainers, since it mainly focussed on how the “.cm” domain makes money of “.com” typos. However the short interview with Business 2.0′s Paul Sloan was based on the title story of tomorrow’s business 2.0 magazine, “The Man who owns the Internet”, which promises to be a more in-depth story.

The story mentioned how Kevin also is trying to make similar deals for .om (Oman), .ne (Niger) and .et (Ethiopia). It failed to mention, how Google and MSN also profit directly from Typos by displaying default search results in some webbrowsers when a mistyped domain does not exist.

[Update]: You can watch the video here.